Netflix Inc. announced last February that it would no longer be possible to share accounts between people residing in different households unless an extra supplement was paid in the usual fee. This change generated a lot of controversy among its customers, and it seemed that the streaming platform was going to lose a lot of followers. But against all odds, this has not been the case.
A report published by the research firm Antenna has revealed that the number of subscribers in the United States has increased considerably. In fact, it is estimated that Netflix got more than 70,000 new customers a day in the four days after May 23, when it began announcing to its subscribers that they could no longer share their account. On two of those days, there were more than 100,000 new subscriptions in the US, much higher growth than in the worst days of the pandemic.
Netflix estimates that, worldwide, up to 100 million households enjoy its service without paying. The company tested ways to limit password sharing in Latin America before rolling out the program in more countries, including Spain, Australia, and the United States. The results of Netflix’s plan in the US clash with those in Spain, where the audience research firm Kantar estimates that one million users have abandoned the streaming platform since it was announced that account sharing could no longer be shared.
Despite the fact that in the first quarter of 2023 the number of new subscribers was only 1.75 million globally, a very low figure compared to the last quarter of 2022, of 7.66 million, the company addressed its shareholders and assured them that “they were on track to meet financial targets for all of 2023.”
“For the second quarter of 2023, we forecast revenues of 8.2 billion dollars, which represents a year-on-year increase of 3%,” they highlighted in the letter, after assuring that the restrictions were paying off.
In the letter they also explained that as “users who used shared accounts began to create their own accounts and also increased accounts with extra members”, which means an increase in income. Thus, it was justified that the loss of users is not bad, since the volume of income has increased.
